Comment on WordPress SEO Theme Reviews by SEO Dave.

Stallion Responsive SEO Theme Stallion currently has no product review specific feature, like a Star Rating system.

It is a WP theme feature area I’m interested in since it’s a site niche Internet marketers tend to get into and Stallion is aimed at people like me who want to make money online from a variety of site niches.

While I was working on the Stallion 6.1 update had a look at a couple of star rating plugins, one called “GD Star Rating” looked interesting from a feature perspective, BUT there were SEO issues with the code.

The plugin author had used link code (like a text link minus anchor text and a URL, like a broken link) with rel=”nofollow” attributes.

<a id="gdsrX246X5X1XcXcomment_rater_246Xcomment_loader_246X11X16" title="5 / 5" class="s5" rel="nofollow"></a>

I’m not sure how Google would treat link code like that, worse case scenario is it’s treated as a standard text link which has the potential to seriously damage SERPs: anchor text of links is very important, these have none, nofollow deletes link benefit and the plugin generates a lot of links like the above since each post can have over 10 for the post and 10 for each comment.

Was quite heavy on database queries on posts with a lot of comments, a post with 30 odd comments had an extra 150+ database queries for example. If it wasn’t for the database queries I might see if I could fix the code issue, should be able to replace the code with span tags which have no SEO impact.

Relatively easy to find interesting features, but not so easy if you don’t want to damage a sites SEO or waste server resources.

David